Epilogue
Delilah
The apple cake comes out of the oven exactly on time, which should have been my first warning that today was going to be different.
It's the ninth of January and the fog has been sitting over town since Christmas, thick enough this morning that I can't see the bridge from the kitchen window, only the smudge of the streetlight outside Kimmie's gallery holding on past nine.
The heating pipe behind the pastry case is doing the thing where it knocks four times and stops.
I've got the ovens going and the coffee machine on and the front of the café is warm enough to steam the inside of the windows, which is exactly how the regulars like it and exactly why none of them ever go home.
I set the cake on the rack and look at it for a while. Golden all the way to the edges. Not one dark spot in sight.
"That's not right," Bill says from his table, without lowering his paper.
"It's perfect."
"That's what I said."
I'm thirty nine weeks and four days, and I am enormous.
I stopped being able to see my own feet in November.
My apron gave up around the same time and now ties above the bump like a very small flag on a very large hill.
Sammie has instructed me to stop working four separate times.
Purr and Pour opens at seven, and it has opened at seven every day for five years, and I would rather be here than at home wondering what everybody else is doing.
Lucifer has been following me since I unlocked the door.
Not sitting in his usual place on the cash registered, not conducting his inspection, just walking three feet behind me from the counter to the kitchen and back again with the grim persistence of a man serving a warrant.
When I stop, he stops. Duchess has abandoned the high shelf entirely and is lying across the top of the pastry case where she is absolutely not allowed, watching me with both eyes.
"Your cats are being weird," Bill says.
"They're always weird."
"Not like this they're not." He scrunches up his face as he watches Lemur walk circles around my feet.
Sammie comes in at twenty past nine with Lilah on her hip. Lilah goes down onto the floor the second she's released and heads for the cats at the speed of a girl with somewhere to be.
"You're still standing," Sammie says.
"I'm working."
"You're leaning." She ties her apron and gives me a long, unimpressed look. "How long has she been leaning on the counter like that, Bill?"
"Fifteen minutes."
I’m starting to dislike Bill.
"My back hurts. But my back has hurt since October, so it’s not a pregnancy thing."
Kimmie comes over from the gallery ten minutes later, the way she does most mornings now, shaking out her hair and putting a folder of framing quotes down on the end of the counter.
"How are you feeling?" she asks.
"Everybody keeps asking me that," I mumble, slicing a piece of cake for her.
She nods slowly. "That's because you look like you're about to give birth in a coffee shop."
I ignore her and do what I always do, steam milk and pull shots and call out names, except that at some point I notice I've stopped between orders, both palms flat on the counter, waiting out something that tightens low across the front of me and then goes away again.
It happens while Mrs. Aldridge is telling me about her sister.
It happens again while I'm boxing a dozen buns. It happens a third time and I look at the clock over the door. Then I put the box down and go and check the tray of scones I’ve got in the oven.
I know what it is. I've known what it is since about half past eight.
I want another hour. That's the whole of my reasoning. One more hour of normal, one more hour of this exact place before everything about my life changes.
Ten past eleven, I'm reaching up for the good icing bag on the top shelf, which I could have asked Sammie to get, and something inside me gives with a distinct and unmistakable pop.
I stand very still in the middle of the kitchen.
"Sammie," I call out.
"Mm?"
"Sammie!"
The second one brings her through the doorway at a speed could be a run if I squint just right. She takes in the floor and my face and puts one hand flat on the frame.
"Okay," she says. "Okay. Right."
Out front, Bill's voice comes through with the enormous satisfaction of a man whose entire life has been leading to this moment. "Is it happening? I said this morning. I said it about the cake."
"You said nothing about the cake, Bill."
"I said it was unusual."
Kimmie appears with an armful of the good tea towels and a look of absolute terror.
Mrs. Aldridge takes over the register without being asked and starts telling people the machine is broken.
Somebody's toddler is removed from the vicinity of the mop bucket.
Lucifer sits down directly in front of me and refuses to move, which means that everyone entering the kitchen has to step over a cat, and Duchess supervises the entire operation from the pastry case like a woman who saw all this coming and can't be held responsible.
Sammie has her phone against her ear. "Eduard. Yes. Now. No, actually now."
Another one comes and this one has teeth in it. I get both hands on the edge of the prep table and breathe through it while Sammie counts out loud beside me, and when it lets go I straighten up and reach for my phone with fingers that don't entirely belong to me.
"I need to call Jasper."
The bell over the front door goes.
I know the sound of him coming in. He comes through the kitchen doorway in his leather jacket, and doesn’t look surprised.
"How are you here?" I ask as another contraction takes hold.
He crosses the kitchen, steps over the cat without appearing to notice it, and puts his hand on the side of my face.
"Bag's in the car," he says. "St. Anne's know we're coming."
"Jasper. How are you here?"
Bill answers from the doorway before he can. "He's been out there every day for a fortnight," he says. "Truck across the road, by the postbox. I've been taking him coffee."
I scowl at my husband.
He looks back at me with absolutely no shame whatsoever.
"Thirty six weeks," he says. "It seemed sensible."
There's a laugh coming up out of me and it turns into something else on the way.
I put my forehead down against his chest and get a fistful of his jacket and hold on.
Three weeks after he put the ring on my finger I sat on the closed lid of my bathroom toilet and looked at two pink lines.
Every single thing since then has been him arranging the world around me while telling me it's only sensible.
"I'm going to have this baby," I tell his jacket. When the pain subsides I add, "In the car, possibly."
"Not in the car." He tips my chin up. "I've timed it. I can get us there in eleven minutes."
He lifts me like I’m not an actual hippopotamus and carries me out through the front, because there's no dignified way to do this and I've decided not to try.
The whole café stands up. Bill holds the door.
Kimmie is crying and shouting ‘good luck.’ Sammie kisses the side of my head and tells me she'll close up early and meet me at the hospital.
Lilah, held on somebody's hip in the middle of all of it, waves at me with her whole arm the way she waves at the trash truck.
The last thing I see through the window as we pull away in Jasper’s ridiculous van is Lucifer, back up on the till where he belongs, satisfied that the situation has been handed over to the appropriate authority.
Ilya William Federov arrives at eleven minutes past six that evening, after seven hours that I will describe to my son one day as character building.
He comes out furious. Eight pounds and one ounce of black hair and outrage, screaming the roof off the delivery suite, and then he's on my chest and he stops, all at once, like somebody put a hand on a bell.
Jasper hasn't said anything for a while.
He's sitting on the edge of the bed with one arm behind me and his other hand hovering an inch off the baby's back, and when I look up at his face I find something there I've only ever seen once before.
On an ordinary morning in the café, when I turned around with a four month old asleep on my shoulder and caught him looking at me.
"You can touch him," I say.
He puts his hand down. It covers the entire length of his son's back, and Ilya makes one small noise and settles into it. My husband puts his mouth against my hair and stays there for a long time without saying a word.
"William," he says eventually. "Bill's going to be insufferable."
I yawn. "I can’t believe he was sneaking you coffee for two weeks."
Ilya yawns too, as though being born was the most exhausting thing ever. His little hand shoots out and takes hold of my finger and I realize; this is it. This is what I was waiting for my entire life.